By Gene and Katie Hamilton

Fresh, pure water is a must for cooking and drinking, and installing a filtering faucet at your kitchen sink is a good way to reduce harmful impurities in your tap water. An indicator on the unit shows when to change the filter, a simple chore even if you're not so handy. The unit will eliminate costly water services, and give you filtered water right where you want it at the touch of a button.

A plumber will charge $490 to replace an existing sink faucet with a good quality, one-handle filtering unit, assuming no new plumbing lines are required. That includes labor and material. If you have some experience with plumbing projects, you can make the swap for $275, the cost of the filtering faucet, and save 43 percent.

The project involves removing the existing faucet, which may require some nudging to loosen corrosion with a penetrating oil spray like WD-40. Turn off the water at the supply and disconnect the water lines from the faucet lines, then remove the mounting hardware with a basin wrench. Follow the directions - which are pretty straightforward - that come with the faucet to install it. For tools, you'll only probably need a Phillips screwdriver and some adjustable wrenches.

If you need to replace the supply tubes get ones longer than what’s needed because you can cut copper and plastic tubes to the lengths you need, but you can’t lengthen them. For those that are flexible, just put a coil in the line when installing it. If you want filtered water to go to your icemaker install a second t-fitting in the line after the filter.

Don't want to get involved doing this job yourself? Click Home Advisor, a free referral service that connects homeowners with local prescreened contractors.

That sums it up. Knowing the average cost to install a filtering faucet lets you compare doing it yourself with what you can expect to pay a contractor. To customize the cost to where you live add your ZIP Code in the cost box.

Improvement and Repair Cost Updated 2019

The cost and time data is generated by averaging labor and material data from annually updated cost books used by contractors and refined by the authors' experience remodeling 13 houses. They are authors of 20 home improvement books and Do It Yourself or Not, a weekly column syndicated by Tribune Content Agency. The national cost can be adjusted by ZIP Code.